Fair Game (37 page)

‘It’s huge,’ said Shepherd. He took off his helmet and ear-defenders.

‘It has to be,’ said Tomasz. ‘It has to move a hundred and thirty thousand tonnes from a dead stop to twenty knots. And it has to sail around the world no matter what the weather. You need a lot of power to do that.’

‘A hundred thousand horses,’ said Shepherd. ‘And that’s one hell of a lot of horses.’

‘You see how they have twelve pistons?’ said Konrad. ‘The old engines were six pistons, now they have twelve.’ He grinned. ‘Twice as much work but the same number of people. Tell that to head office when you get back. Tell them that engineers are working twice as hard as they used to.’

‘I will,’ said Shepherd, though he knew that he’d never be saying anything to the company bosses.

Konrad clapped him on the back. ‘Make sure you do,’ he said. ‘Now, come with me, this way.’ He led Shepherd through a door to the right of the lift, a tool room with dozens of tools and pieces of equipment on the walls. A seaman wearing dark blue overalls was filing away at a piece of metal. At the far end of the room was a metal hatchway with a wheel lock in the middle. Konrad turned the wheel and pulled the hatch open with a grunt. ‘This is what the chief said I should show you,’ he said.

Shepherd followed Konrad through the hatch into a tunnel that stretched left and right, running the full length of the ship. It was painted a pale yellow and was about five feet wide and maybe ten feet high. Konrad gestured with his thumb. ‘That way’s the bow, it runs right up to the Bosun’s Store and then back along the port side.’ He pointed to the right. ‘And it goes all the way to the stern and around. It’s the Below Deck Passageway,’ said Konrad. ‘It runs all around the ship, between the engine room and holds and the hull of the ship.’ He grinned. ‘The crew calls it the Burma Road.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘Mainly for checking the tanks,’ Konrad said. He kicked the floor with the heel of his steel-tipped boots. ‘They’re underneath us. The oil tanks and the water ballast tanks, for adjusting our trim. And we use it to gain access to the pilot hatches; the pilots usually come on board through them from their ships. I’ll show you.’

He took Shepherd along to the middle of the ship and showed him a hatchway in the floor with a locking wheel in the middle of it. He kicked it with his boot. ‘You open that and it leads down to a waiting area where you can open the hatch in the hull. The pilot comes up through here, through into the engine room, and then we take him in the lift up to the bridge.’

Shepherd looked around the metal corridor. It was about five feet wide and every few feet there were metal buttresses, presumably to add strength to the structure, though the metal floor was clear of any obstructions. He frowned, wondering what he was missing. ‘Why did the chief want you to show me this?’ he asked.

Konrad laughed. ‘He thought you could run here. All around the ship, it’s more than seven hundred metres.’

‘Are you serious?’

Konrad nodded. ‘Sure. This way there’s no chance of you falling overboard.’

Two tugs were gently easing the
Athena
towards the dockside, like tiny birds pecking away at an elephant. Harry Kamal couldn’t work out where all the power came from to move the massive ship sideways. ‘How much does it weigh, the ship?’ he asked.

The man sitting in the driving seat of the rusting Nissan Sunny shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Who cares?’ Kamal only knew the man’s first name. Ishan. Ishan was morbidly obese with rolls of fat around his neck and always appeared to be suffering from the heat and humidity of Pakistan, even though he had been born there forty-five years earlier.

Kamal, on the other hand, had been born thousands of miles away in a suburb of Birmingham and had been brought up with the chilly winters and rainy autumns of the Midlands, but he had never found the heat or humidity of Pakistan to be a problem. ‘I didn’t realise they were so big.’

The tugs were pushing the ship into a gap between two other freighters, with perfect precision.

‘Eleven thousand and forty TEUs,’ said Ishan, mopping his brow with a damp handkerchief. ‘There’s not many bigger, but they’ve got ships twice that size on the drawing boards.’

‘Unbelievable,’ said Kamal, shaking his head.

‘To be honest, a ship is a ship,’ said Ishan. ‘A hull, and an engine, and that’s it. The only restriction on the size is whether or not the ports can handle them.’ He took out a silver pocket watch and flipped it open. ‘They’re late,’ he said. ‘They’re always late.’

Containers were being picked up by the cranes and whipped off the ships that were tethered to the dockside and on to waiting trucks. As soon as one truck drove off with its load another moved to take its place. The cranes were the height of ten-storey buildings, massive metal structures that reached the full width of the ships, controlled by operators sitting in small plexiglass cubicles who whizzed to and fro above the grabber units that picked up the containers as easily as if they were a child’s building blocks. Kamal had never seen anything like it. ‘You can hardly believe that men could build things as big as this,’ he said. ‘It’s breathtaking. Literally breathtaking.’

Ishan squirmed uncomfortably as he put his watch away, then wiped the back of his neck with his handkerchief. ‘It’s just a port,’ he said. ‘They’re the same the world over.’

The car was parked between two stacks of containers, facing the sea. They had been there for the best part of an hour, wearing cheap suits with port IDs clipped to their breast pockets. Kamal didn’t know if Ishan had been paid to get him on board the
Athena
or if he was doing it because of his beliefs. He didn’t care so he didn’t ask; all that mattered was that he got on to the ship and had time alone with the vessel’s computer.

Computers were Kamal’s speciality. He’d always been good with computers, ever since his father had bought him a Sony laptop for his tenth birthday. Kamal preferred computers to people. Computers didn’t steal his lunch money or punch him in the school toilets or call him ‘Paki’ or make jokes about his name. Kamal was a good Pakistani name. It meant water lily. But at school he was Kamal the Camel. The more he was bullied the more time he spent in his bedroom with his computer. But unlike most teenagers he didn’t fool around with computer games and chat rooms, instead he devoted himself to programming. He was fifteen when he designed and released his first computer virus, which resulted in all the teachers in Birmingham schools seeing their wages cut by half. His second virus was aimed at one of the country’s largest banks and transferred almost a million pounds to a charity helping children in the poorest areas of Pakistan before the bank’s security people neutralised it.

Kamal was readily accepted at a top London university after getting A-level results that were so impressive that he was featured in the local newspaper. It was as a student that he began to become more involved with Islam. His first step was a small one. A pretty girl in a headscarf had asked him to sign a petition protesting against a shop’s decision not to serve Muslim women wearing the burka. Kamal had been more interested in the girl than the petition, but he began to attend Islamic meetings and for the first time found people who seemed to be happy in his company. For the first time in his life he had real friends.

Before long he was attending several mosques and taking lessons in the Koran, learning Arabic so that he could read it in its original form. The more he learned about Islam the less he wanted to work in the Western world. Kamal had wanted to leave university in his second year, but his imam had persuaded him to continue his studies. Education was the key to everything, the imam had told him. Without education man is no better than an animal. Kamal realised that the imam was right, but that didn’t stop him from attending a training camp in northern Pakistan during his summer break after his second year. Three members of his mosque were going and he needed little persuasion to join them. He’d paid for his ticket on his credit card and was told that all his expenses in Pakistan would be taken care of. The four young men had flown out together on the pretext of attending the wedding of a close friend but they were met at Islamabad Airport by a grizzled man in his fifties with an eye patch and three fingers missing from his left hand. His name was Salim and he showed them to a waiting coach before heading back into the arrivals terminal and returning an hour later with four more young Pakistani men, who sat together at the back of the coach and spoke with Scottish accents.

Kamal spent six weeks in a training camp, and he was never precisely sure where it was. They’d driven in the coach for the best part of eight hours and then they’d been transferred to a truck, where they’d sat facing each other on wooden benches, the sides of the truck covered with flapping tarpaulin, for another four hours. The camp was in a dry, dusty valley, little more than four wooden cabins next to an obstacle course and a firing range. As they’d driven up to the camp on the first day, Kamal had flinched at the sound of automatic gunfire, but after just a week he was able to strip and fire a Kalashnikov as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

His training was made up of three parts. He was schooled in Islam in a way that he’d never been schooled before. His eyes were opened to the true meaning of the Koran and it was explained to him what Allah expected from his followers. He was taught history, too. Not the British imperial history that he’d learned at school, the history of fat kings and holocausts and wars and Roman conquests, but the history that mattered, the history of Islam and how the most holy and pure of religions had been persecuted throughout the ages. He studied the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition and studied the way the European colonial powers had invaded countries across Asia and Africa, from Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east, killing Muslims wherever they went. The killings had continued to the present day, with Muslims dying in Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and then in Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and Kamal was taught that there would be no stopping the Crusaders until the Muslim world met the violence with violence.

The third leg of his training was physical. He was made to run, to jump, to crawl and to shoot. He was taught how to fire the workhorse of the oppressed, the AK-47, and to strip it and reload it blindfold, he was taught to make Molotov cocktails and how to throw them, he was shown how to fire an RPG though never actually got to pull the trigger himself, and he was schooled in the use of knives and clubs. In the final week he was shown how to make basic explosives and how to put together IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that were so successful in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Three of the men on the course were taken off for special training, to a separate hut where they studied, ate and prayed independently of the rest of the group. Kamal knew that they had been selected as
shahid
, an Arabic word that literally meant witness but which had come to mean glorious martyr, a Muslim who gave his life in the name of jihad.

Kamal had asked his instructors if he could join the
shahids
but he was told that the computer skills he had were far too valuable to be thrown away. Kamal had been surprised that they knew about his talent for programming, but he listened to what his instructors told him and returned to his degree studies and waited for the call. When it came he was asked to design a very specific computer virus and to take it to Pakistan. That is how he came to be sitting in the car with Ishan, watching the giant container ship being nudged into position.

Men in overalls and hard hats were soon pulling on ropes fore and aft; the ship was tied up and about twenty minutes later the gangway was lowered into place.

‘Right,’ said Ishan, opening the car door. ‘We can go on board now. Say nothing until we are in the Ship Office. It is possible that we may be searched but don’t worry, they are looking for guns, not what you are carrying.’

Kamal nodded. They got out of the car and Ishan took two fluorescent jackets out of the boot and gave one to Kamal. They put them on as they walked over to the ship. Kamal had to crane his neck to see the top of the superstructure and he could just about make out two figures standing there, looking down. He had a childish urge to wave up at them but he lowered his eyes. He wasn’t there for fun, he was there to further jihad. He followed Ishan up the gangway, keeping his eyes fixed on the other man’s legs and fighting the urge to look down. He’d never liked heights and he hadn’t expected to have to climb up to the ship. Ishan’s fat thighs rubbed against each other.

Ishan reached the top and turned to look at Kamal, whose forehead was beaded with sweat. ‘Are you OK?’ he whispered.

Kamal waved away the man’s concern. ‘I’m fine,’ he said.

The ship’s second officer was standing with a hand-held metal detector and he slowly ran it up and down Ishan, and then did the same with Kamal. Kamal smiled as the detector passed over his body without making a sound. Ishan was right, they were looking for guns or knives or maybe a bomb, but what he was carrying in the pocket of his jacket would cause far more damage than any weapon.

The second officer gave the two men ship IDs, which they clipped to their fluorescent jackets, and then he called up the chief officer on his transceiver. ‘Planner is on board, two persons, on their way,’ he said, then pointed to the hatch that led to the corridor. ‘Straight down, on the right,’ he indicated, then he noticed the deck cadet coming along from the bow and asked him if he’d take the two men along to the Ship Office.

The deck cadet led them through the hatchway and tapped in the four-digit code to open the door and showed them where the office was. The chief officer looked around as he heard the door opening. ‘Planner’s here,’ said the deck cadet. He held the door open for the two men and then went back outside.

‘Hello, Chief,’ said Ishan, offering his hand. They shook and Ishan introduced Kamal as his assistant.

‘You have the files?’ asked the chief officer, holding out his hand.

Kamal took the thumb drive from his jacket and gave it to him. On it were all the details of the containers that were to be loaded on and off the ship. The planner’s job was to ensure that the loading was as efficient as possible, and that the containers were stacked correctly. The heavier containers had to go at the bottom, containers with explosives or with flammable liquids inside had to be kept well away from the engine room, certain chemicals had to be stored away from other chemicals. And the destination of the container also played a part in where it was placed on the ship. In all it was a complicated jigsaw that required computers to monitor and check that every container was in the right place.